In the case of all other sciences, arts, skills, and crafts, everyone is convinced that a complex and laborious programme of learn...ing and practice is necessary for competence. Yet when it comes to philosophy, there seems to be a currently prevailing prejudice to the effect that, although not everyone who has eyes and fingers, and is given leather and last, is at once in a position to make shoes, everyone nevertheless immediately understands how to philosophize.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Magic is akin to science in that it always has a definite aim intimately associated with human instincts, needs, and pursuits. The... magic art is directed towards the attainment of practical aims. Like other arts and crafts, it is also governed by a theory, by a system of principles which dictate the manner in which the act has to be performed in order to be effective.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Self-expression is not enough; experiment is not enough; the recording of special moments or cases is not enough. All of the arts ...have broken faith or lost connection with their origin and function. They have ceased to be concerned with the legitimate and permanent material of art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

As the distinctions among the arts are distinctions among the sensorial directions of aesthetic expression (sight, speech, hearing...), the visual arts crystallize a state of mind at its farthest point, where it borders on the images of things. The verbal arts seem instead to arrest the uncertain impression which a state of mind produces in us before it assumes that simplification which is able to reconcile it with space and make it a visual image. One is reminded of what Matthew Arnold said, that "poetry is more intellectual than art, more interpretative ... poetry is less artistic than the arts, but in closer correspondence with the intelligential nature of man, who is defined, as we know, 'a thinking animal'"; poetry thinks and arts do not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

In spite of their obvious differences, folk art and popular art have much in common; they are easy to understand, they are romanti...c, patriotic, conventionally moral, and they are held in deep affection by those who are suspicious of the great arts. Popular artists can be serious, like Frederick Remington, or trivial, like Charles Dana Gibson; they can be men of genius like Chaplin or men of talent like Harold Lloyd; they can be as uni versal as Dickens or as parochial as E.P. Roe; one thing common to all of them is the power to communicate directly with everyone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

... anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high, the air heavy or clear and anybody is as there is w...ind or no wind there. It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn and everything.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The disaster ... is not the money, although the money will be missed. The disaster is the disrespect--this belief that the arts ar...e dispensable, that they're not critical to a culture's existence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

See yonder thin column of smoke curling up through the woods from some invisible farmhouse, the standard raised over some rural ho...mestead.... It is a hieroglyphic of man's life, and suggests more intimate and important things than the boiling of a pot. Where its fine column rises above the forest, like an ensign, some human life has planted itself,--and such is the beginning of Rome, the establishment of the arts, and the foundation of empires, whether on the prairies of America or the steppes of Asia.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »